Wednesday, February 4, 2015

We have tablet PCs at my school, and as a (former) math teacher, I can't imagine teaching without one.

If you don't know what a tablet PC is, it's a fully functional laptop whose display swivels around and becomes a write-able surface. It's basically a smartboard within the computer. The district researched them several years ago (6? 7?) and decided to go with these as opposed to a smartboard because of the portability of them.

Anyway.

There are two different programs on the tablet that are conducive for inking on - Microsoft Journal and Microsoft OneNote. I tended to stick with Journal because I liked the writing style (I'm picky about how things look) but I like the organizational aspect of OneNote. It's really like creating 3-ring binders for your files. You can have tabs with pages and subpages. An organizer's dream!

Here's an example of the tabs across the top:

And then the pages along the side:

I've been doing some work with the Math Course of Study Committee in my district and was checking out the pacing guides for Math 1, 2, and 3. We went with the Integrated Pathway so have had to create and arrange a lot of stuff on our own. While I was perusing our 97-page google doc of the "unpacked" standards, it occurred to me that it would be really hard to find a standard in there without a lot of digging.

So, with nothing else on my plate for the day, I put together a OneNote notebook for Math 1. And the cool thing is, it's sharable! (Wish it was embeddable, but that may just be too much to hope for.)